What will certainly in the future become legend: my attempt to capture true adventure - the drama, pain, and hilarity of our largely unplanned six-month trip across the country. It's like reality TV, except you're going to read it!

Tile Grout and Drug Cartels

I have felt an allegiance to every single place I have lived: the third-floor palace that I left in Dover; my various college apartments and dorms, where I lived with so many of my friends; the hippie house in Lee where I lived for a summer; and of course Goffstown, where I grew up. Having said that, I understand that there must be residents of Sanderson, Texas who feel the same sort of fond connection to their community. I apologize to these people for the evaluation of their town that I am about to furnish. Sanderson, Texas is…evocative of one of the circles of Hell…a little bit deeper than purgatory or limbo…somewhere by the river Styx, perhaps – a deserted, waterless cruise of eternal damnation. We stayed at the Desert Air Motel, which was a one-story motel with about 12 rooms, with cinder block walls, ancient patchwork quilts and ancient paisley curtains, and pink-tiled bathrooms that needed a serious grout session. (When the showerhead is caked with blackened mildew, that is a fine day to skip the shower; I don’t need streams of moldy bacteria coursing over me.) There was an obese poodle who belonged to the man at the front desk, whose turds liberally decorated the motel parking lot.

There was a Town & Country gas station across the street filled with strange people, some appearing to be genetically mutated. Normally, Sarah and I are both very sociable, but when we were inside the Town & Country convenience store, there were exactly zero people whom we felt like associating with. When we first drove into town, we couldn’t find a place to eat except for the ‘Country Cookin’ place inside the Town & Country. And the culinary selection was limited: limp burritos and friiiiiiiiiied chicken that had been sitting on the counter underneath a heat lamp for about 8 hours. We ate that for lunch, and when dinnertime came, we called the man with the poodle at the front desk to ask if there was any place to order pizza or something, (even though we suspected that that was about the stupidest question we could possibly ask) and he merely chortled and informed us that “Only place ta get food is ‘cross the street.” You got it – another serving of the tantalizing heat-lamped cuisine of Country Cookin’. A town whose only eatery is in a convenience store. And I don’t know who exactly was doing the country cookin’, but it was no five-star sustenance.

The rest of the buildings in Sanderson could each be put into one of three categories: slowly crumbling into the earth, empty and closed indefinitely, or reasonably intact with crooked FOR SALE signs in the windows.I don’t know what happened to Sanderson, but it is clear that its glory days have long passed. Broken-down hotels, restaurants, a movie theater which probably hadn’t played a movie since they began making color films. It made me sad to see a town so pathetically devoid of life. It made me curious as to what the ‘better days’ in Sanderson were like - if people were happy here once. I did learn that many Texan towns died because laws were passed regulating how much water could be taken from the Rio Grande to support the communities. Well, at the very least, Sanderson has country cookin’.

The general differences between Texas roads and roads back home have really struck me. There can be fifty, sixty, eighty miles between towns with just fields of brownish-green nothing – but there are two things that are certainties about all of these roads: roadkill and trash. I mentioned the roadkill before, but it warrants a second mention because there’s just SO MUCH. I saw a deer carcass rotting on the side of the road a few days ago, and its white, vulture-picked ribs were visible. I suppose they figure that with all of the carrion-ravenous birds around here they have no need to send road crews to clear the vehicular-massacred wildlife off of the roads. I was told by some locals that the rule is: Swerve if it’s big, hit it if it’s small. It’s sad to hit a roadrunner, though, because they mate for life. The littering is horrific, too. It seems that people just toss everything out of their windows onto the shoulders of the roads, and the barbed-wire fences that flank the roads on either side are like sieves, trapping the beer bottles and flapping plastic bags in ugly roadside collages of trash. Don’t mess with Texas.

Writing this from a female perspective, as we travel just miles from the Texas/Mexico border, I am very glad to be living in New Hampshire. When we were staying in Laredo, the restaurant in the Holiday Inn was closed from 3 to 5 pm. Of course, Sarah and I figured that out at about 3:15, when we were starving. So, we decided to venture out onto Garden Street in search of some food. (Ever notice the irony of crappy apartment buildings or streets that have names like ‘Windshire Estates’ or ‘Garden Street’?) That was a big mistake. We were both wearing skirts and small tank tops, and almost immediately when we reached the street I was wishing that I weighed 300 pounds and was wearing a burlap bag. Or a trench coat with an automatic weapon underneath. Or a bulletproof vest. Or chain mail armor.Sarah and I are not unattractive girls, and we have been catcalled in the past, as all girls have. What we experienced during the following ten minutes, however, was unlike any encounter with lewd men I have ever had. Immediately, cars full of Latino men started beeping and whistling and leaning way out of their windows and yelling assumably dirty things in Spanish to us as we walked along past sketchy roadside shops selling cow skulls and terra-cotta lawn ornaments. One car, ancient and dusky blue, was packed full of scary Hispanic men leaning out and hollering at us, and the only reason I glanced at them twice was because I realized that there was no hood on their car – just an engine baking in the 95-degree heat while the passengers hung out to leer at the white girls. A man with a gray do-rag followed us for a while down the street, and he said something to us that was unintelligible to my New England high-school Spanish-trained ears, which we ignored. That’s fine. I don’t want to know what he said. We ended up just giving up the restaurant quest after two blocks, buying beef jerky at a convenience store, and retreating at high speed back to our hotel, as fast as my Old Navy flip-flops would take me. I was genuinely, completely scared. And I hated being scared.

The past week has been a series of Texas towns, all melting into each other in my mind. Bill has ridden his bike every single day; he is doing wonderfully. He needs a haircut, though; his hair sticks out of the ventilation holes on the top of his helmet now. (Get a haircut, Bill.) We spoke to a few Texas businessmen at the Holiday Inn in Laredo, and when we shared our opinions of Texas thus far, they were upset and informed us that we hadn’t seen enough ‘real Texas’. It’s true; we haven’t been to Houston, or San Antonio, or Dallas, or any place I’ve really heard of yet. I am excited to get into northeastern Texas and experience these places and develop positive opinions of them. They cautioned us again about trying to go into Mexico from any of the border crossings around here, and we assured them that we had no intention whatsoever of doing that. Laredo is just a short walk across a bridge over the Rio Grande from Nuevo Laredo, which is its ‘twin city’ in Mexico. The cities are referred to as ‘los dos Laredos’. And the crime in this area is really, really bad. Young girls disappear around here. Actually, over 30 Americans have disappeared in the past few months in Nuevo Laredo. And in a 2005 survey of living conditions in U.S. cities, the Laredo in Texas ranked 331st out of 331. The businessmen told us that the Mexican drug czars, kings of cartels and smaller factions called cartelitos, cruise around in motorcades as big as President Bush’s; black Suburbans with actual missile launchers mounted on them, no kidding. Missile launchers. And the Mexican police do absolutely nothing about it. Yeah, I’ll stay on this side of the border. You don’t have to tell me twice.

And the three of us have had a reasonably uneventful time recently; we did have a fun night in Mission, Texas tailgating in the parking lot of the Best Western off of the back of some oil field workers’ pickup truck. Sarah, Bill and I were out there for a while hangin’ with Jerry, Joe Don, and Anthony and their gigantic cooler of Miller Lite. (And Michelob Ultra for Jerry…he’s trying to lose some weight.) Bill discussed some investing with them; hopefully Data-Driven Publishing, LLC will add some rich Texans to their clientele. They were also telling us crazy border stories of seeing men swimming across the Rio Grande with bales (yes, like hay bales) of marijuana on their backs…and here’s a good one: the time when a man pulled his car over to the side of the road, checked for cops, popped his trunk, and yelled something into a clump of bushes, which produced men swiftly carrying armloads of weed that they stuffed into the trunk. This is stuff you see if you stick around here apparently – good thing we are NOT sticking around. It’s all just plain crazy.